Forever and Always

Acknowledge what you have while you have it - Story the Snap contest

The miracle of children is hard to describe. The miracle of parents is even harder. Years and years go by without us realising how precious our parents are, and that our time with them is limited and should not be taken for granted. We never realise this until we are left without them, until we look at old photographs of them and tears well up in our eyes.

Mothers are the most precious creatures on Earth. No one can do the things they do. They give without expecting anything in return, they know without having to ask and they are always there to comfort you even if they don’t have anyone to comfort them. When we are young, we never realise this. We blame them for ‘ruining our lives’ because they don’t let us stay out late, or give us money so we can spend it on expensive clothes which we don’t actually need, or because they don’t approve of our boyfriend, who later turns out to a jerk, just like they said he was. Mothers are amazing people who never get appreciated enough.

When we turn eighteen and we finally leave ‘the nest’, we push our mothers away, not before wiping away their tears, and wave goodbye while we zoom off into the distance, leaving them felling empty. Then they enter the house and sigh at the realisation that they will no longer hear you come through the door. Meanwhile, our mothers never enter our thoughts because we are too enthralled by our newly acquired freedom. Years go by and we soon find ourselves having children of our own. That’s when we remember our parents, especially our mothers, and we realise how great our childhood was and how well we had been cared for.

When the kids grow up, we start visiting our parents, and our mothers take on their role of grandmothers with so much ease that it leaves us gaping in admiration. When we are busy with work, we call up our mothers to ask them to look after our children, and the answer is always yes, no matter how busy they are. We breathe a sigh of relief that we will be able to work in peace, and turn back to our work without giving the situation a second thought. This process is repeated several times, and our parents start to seek comfort in our children, while we go about our daily struggles without having to worry about our children. Soon, we find our children more attached to our mothers than they are to us, and so we go to turn to them to ask where we went wrong. Their knowledge and experience help us repair our relationship with our children, making us feel at ease again.

This also leads to us becoming closer to our mother, almost a lifetime later than we should have. We start learning things about her that we never realised before, and we learn so many things that help us in our own life that we wonder why we never went to seek her advice sooner. Then one day we go to our parents’ house, together with our whole family, to finally thank her for the great things that she has helped us achieve and for realising how wonderful she really is. But then our father opens the door, tears flowing down his cheeks, and tells us that she has passed away last night, in her sleep. Along with the flood of tears that overcome you, guilt and regret also make themselves know, making it hard to breathe. A year later, when you go to her grave, you tell her how truly sorry you are that you never got the chance to properly thank her for helping you achieve everything in life and for creating such a wonderful being. You realise that you took for granted all those years that you had with her and that, only know, have you come to appreciate how important she was to you.